


This is your armour and these are your battles

by Fishandchickennuggetsplease



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Friendship, Giving them a happy ending before the Riverdale writers can ruin it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 11:41:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14188158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fishandchickennuggetsplease/pseuds/Fishandchickennuggetsplease
Summary: Toni Topaz has learnt a lot of things in her time. She's learnt how to plait back her hair with no mirror. How to make good scrambled eggs. How to jiggle the lock at the White Wyrm just right to lock up the bar at the end of her shift._____A sort of character study for Toni, featuring Cheryl, her friendships with the other serprents, and how she gets her happy ending.





	This is your armour and these are your battles

**Author's Note:**

> The relationship with Cheryl and Toni has totally captured my imagination, and I sort of wanted to fill in the blanks a little. I’ll admit, this is my chance to give them all a happy ending before the writers add more drama...

Toni Topaz has learnt a lot of things in her time. She's learnt how to plait back her hair with no mirror. How to make good scrambled eggs. How to jiggle the lock at the White Wyrm just right to lock up the bar at the end of her shift.

She's learnt how to build herself from the ground up, how to create a home out of an old mans trailer. She's learnt how to make a family from the broken people you find around you. Maybe it was just the cards she was dealt: she’s never doubted that family is built, bonded, chosen by the individual.

Family- Toni, Fangs, Sweet Pea- they carried eachother. They’d carried her through the first day at Southside High, through their most unpleasant duties as young Serpents, through coming to terms with who she is. That same family carried eachother through the doors of Riverdale High less than a month ago, to a world of well lit classrooms and actual computer labs and a real art department... and also snotty north side teenagers, but they’d learnt to make the most of it. Their little family grew to include Jughead, when he needed it- but somehow he never really understood what it was like to have nothing but your fellow serpents to keep you above water, and Riverdale High is a choppy ocean.

(She holds the record for youngest girl to do the pole dance, so young that the often nasty grown men who frequented the bar had looked away in discomfort at her thirteen year old, barely pubescent form. She placed no pride in owning that record- that dance was the means to an end, to a family. A family that she built.)

Growing up on the south side made the northern part of town seem idyllic, the perfect projection of small town life. 7 year olds sat on rusted swing sets and dreamt of true love, a life on the other side of the tracks with nothing to worry about but what colour to paint the dining room. Bored 14 year olds sat in the back of rowdy middle school classrooms and doodled out brighter futures in a true town with pep. Near closing time at the Wrym, there is reverance in the voices of those who bitch about Alice Cooper- because traitor or not, she made it to the golden side of the tracks.

The part of Toni that was 7 and sat on swing sets, 14 and liked to draw, still believed in the power of the north side. She walked through the front doors of Riverdale High with tiny curl of hope in her chest promising that this would be the end to all their problems. Naturally, it was wrong. They were greeted with distrust, a reputation and outright hatred. The parts of her that have grown up just sighed and pulled on some battle armour.

Sometimes battle armour is leather jackets, pink hair. Sometimes the battle wearing mandatory uniforms.

Sometimes battle armour is 'get your sapphic serpent hands off my body'. God, she's always loved a challenge.

The north side is, amazingly, more twisted and disturbed than her literal gang. The rich kids don't talk to their unfortunate south side neighbours, bar Jughead, but that doesn't mean Toni doesn't listen to gossip that flies down corridors and floats across the changing rooms. The maxim 'money can't buy happiness' must have been written for girls like Veronica Lodge (family-both borrowed and born- falling apart), Josie McCoy (family transforming through dark nights in seedy motels) and Cheryl Blossom (family six feet under).

God, Cheryl. Toni has never met someone more in need of a family.

Fangs is the first to prod her lightly in the arm and tease her for her latest crush.  
"You can't save a lost cause, Topaz"  
She'd paused for a second, forcing herself to remember how the rest of the school saw Cheryl. No one else noticed the shake in her breath before declaring a snarky one liner. No one else saw anything worth saving in the dead-boys-twin-who's-also-a-massive-bitch-haven't-you-heard?  
"Im not saving a lost cause. I'm saving Cheryl."  
He'd looked over at her thoughtfully, knowing better than to try and dissuade her.  
"Just don't let your crush blind you, okay Toni?"  
"I care more about her being okay than I care about her liking me."  
He'd blown air out his nostrils. "Damn Topaz, you're in deep."

The progress is slow, she'll be honest. But she knows what she told a teasing Fangs is true- it matters to her that Cheryl has a family, a support, more than it matters if she gets the girl at the end of the storybook.  
Sneers in the hall way turn to cherry cola at the movie theatre. Sharp tongued insults give way to bitter honesty. (When Toni tells her she’s sensational, she means it from the very depth of her.) Finding a family is hard- as hard as convincing a tattoo parlour in Greendale to print a snake on her skin at 14- and so she doesn’t push it. She goes to the will reading. She sits through dinner. She lets Cheryl take her time in working out she’s loved by someone that isn’t her dead brother.

The next time, it’s Sweet Pea who laughs at her as she slips into the white and yellow shirt and tiny black shorts that had been left in her locker. He’s sitting on the sofa the tiny apartment he shares with his Mom, and really she’s only here because her trailer doesn’t have the space for a full length mirror.  
“Topaz. Seriously? You’re going to be a river vixen?”  
She was fixing the yellow rim on her white tube socks. “Yeah, I guess I am. God, these things are tight.” She falls on to the sofa next to him, tugging the sock over a raised scar from a run in with some ghoullies last month.  
“It’s because they’re made with good quality fabric. We’re not very used to that.” She’d laughed quietly.  
“No, we're not. But I don’t know, that rich person life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”  
He’d looked ready to argue, before sighing. “You might be on to something there. No dad on the south side has ever murdered his own kid.”  
“And aren’t we glad of that.”  
They’d sat in silence for a second, Toni trying to really imagine for once what that gothic horror life would really be like. Sweet Pea shuddered at the thought beside her.  
“You’re good for her.”  
“I... I think I am too.” Another silence. Then he grinned widely again.  
“So, I guess I better get started on thinking up embarrassing nicknames for you, Miss cheerleader.”  
And just like that, Toni was reminded what family was really for.

Sometimes battle armour is silk dressing gowns. Some times the battle is having a slumber party.

Penelope Blossom slams the door closed, and a dark heavy ball of despair falls to the pit of her stomach. There’s a school election going on, Hiram Lodge is building a prison, someone had handed her a flyer of slander against Veronica last week. None of it mattered. Cheryl was gone. She’d gone to the only two people she knew cared about Cheryl even occasionally.  
She had watched as Josie mentally pulled herself together, watched as Veronica dragged herself out of the ocean of family drama that played on loop in her mind and decide to help. (Toni wondered, had they not yet learnt to build their own family?)

When it’s just her and Veronica left- because even Cheryl’s friends only see a lost cause, apparently- she looked hard at the snotty rich girl, currently the most hated and loved member of riverdale high. “She’s tried to commit suicide before, you know. I made her hot cocoa, afterwards.” Somehow, It’s a commitment, a promise.  
“Thank you.”

Sometimes battle armour is catsuits and racy clothing. Sometimes the battle is waiting at the end of the sewer for your friends to save a life.

Cheryl sounds surprised that anyone came to save her. It breaks something inside of Toni (the part that’s 7 and plays on swings, perhaps). They kiss right there and then, and she’s always liked a challenge and she’s the only one who sees Cheryl as something other than her dead brother’s twin and she’s always believed you pick your own family and she’s sensational and it feels like she’s always been waiting for this and it feels- they run. Cheryl grabs her hand as they flee through the forest and against all odd, something in Toni's world slots into place.

That night, all that matters is getting her warm and into Toni’s bed in her trailer. There was plenty of time to talk about what happened and what to do next.

They’re sitting in the Wrym two days later, because Toni had a shift and she’s yet to let her girlfriend out her of sight. It takes Cheryl a little while (and okay, a couple of drinks) before she relaxes into the environment around her, one of her flannels helping her to fit in, as they were yet to send a rescue party to Thistlehouse for Cheryl’s wardrobe. Fangs teases Toni about liking Cheryl, again. Sweet Pea tells the redhead stories about embarrassing things Toni did in middle school, and she laughs. She watches as her only family for so many years begins to adopt yet another.

Back at school, she understands that red lipstick and biting one liners are battle armour. Sometimes the battle is smiling so wide that the world wouldn't dare to try and steal Cheryl Blossom’s happiness again.

Toni gets used to sharing chairs at lunch to fit their new additions around the table- Veronica drifts over the Monday following their rescue, most likely just meaning to check in on Cheryl then leave, and ends up pulling up a chair because really, she’s hated by pretty much everyone by this point and maybe there’s only so much time you can spend with Archie Andrew before your brain turns to mush. She’s got to admit, she likes the girl, can see past the pearls and expensive skirts and see how Veronica is just trying to walk the line between loyalty to the family she’s got and the family she chose in Betty, Archie and Jughead.

Kevin joins them not long after, and Sweet Pea rolls his eyes and complains good naturedly about being overrun. The sheriff’s son sitting with gang members causes some controversy on the way that things always seem to in Riverdale- he wrestles Reggie after training and tells him he likes his new friends just fine, thanks. Cheryl tells her that she trusts him, and so Toni starts to as well. They go for milkshakes sometimes, just the two of them. He tells her about Joaquin.

  
The world still turns. The craziness of Riverdale still surrounds them, rarely subsiding- Hiram Lodge still plans to take over, Fred’s campaign posters appear beside Hermione Lodge’s, Jughead protests for any cause he can. The blue and gold publishes stories about it all, even when Betty knows she shouldn’t. (She dresses again in that sheer black top, and leaves Cheryl at the Pembroke with Veronica and takes her family, her gang, to Thistlehouse. They pack up everything precious to Cheryl and maybe, just maybe on the way out she punches Penelope Blossom in the face before they escape into the night. She’s never been prouder to make the front page.)

They rent their own tiny apartment just down the hall from Sweet Pea’s. They drape it in fairy lights and frame some of Toni’s art projects from her first term at Riverdale high and add five extra locks to the door. Her granddad is glad for his own space again, although he’d never tell them that.

Toni looks over at Cheryl in the apartment during one movie night- real movie nights, with blankets and friends and hot chocolate- and sees pure happiness in her girlfriends face. Cheryl’s building a family, slowly, cautiously. There’s still nights where that same smiling face wakes up tear stained and terrified, but right now, it’s good. They’re good.

Toni Topaz has learnt a lot of things in her life. She’s learnt how to tell what breathing patterns mean Cheryl is thinking about the sisters. She’s learnt how to give a damn good back massage. She’s learnt how to make a tiny apartment a home. She’s learnt how to make a family from the broken people you find around you. Maybe it’s just the cards she’s been dealt; she’s never doubted that family is built, bonded, chosen by the individual. And she thinks they’ve made a pretty good choice.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Feedback is much appreciated :)


End file.
